Eight years after the first British conference dedicated to the study of Jean Rhys’s oeuvre was held at King's College London (July 2010), a three-day international conference entitled ‘Jean Rhys: Transmission Lines’ took place at the Sorbonne in Paris (June 2018). And eight years after the publication of a special issue dedicated to ‘Reading Jean Rhys’ in Women: a cultural review (23: 4, 2012), we present this issue of the same journal, partly derived from papers given at the Paris conference. We mean to carry on the task of reading Jean Rhys’s texts through ‘new critical approaches’.Footnote1 and to probe once again the acute and versatile contemporaneousness of her writing.
‘The Strand was a fitting location for “Reading Jean Rhys”’, the organizers of the first European Jean Rhys conference claimed in their introduction to the 2012 issue.Footnote2 Holding the second one on the ‘Left Bank’ in Paris was equally in order: ‘Paris […] the place Jean loved above all others’, as Diana Athill writes in her 2012 piece on ‘Editing Jean Rhys’, was perhaps the counterpart to ‘Jean's hatred of England – or disappointed love’.Footnote3 ‘The Left Bank’ was the title of her first collection of short stories, and several of her novels (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight) also take place, at least in part, in Paris.
Notes
1 Jeanette Baxter, Anna Snaith and Tory Young, 'Introduction', Women: a cultural review 23:4, 2012, pp. 408–20 (408).
2 Baxter, Snaith and Young, ‘Introduction', pp. 408–20.
3 Diana Athill, ‘Editing Jean Rhys', Women: a cultural review 23:4, 2012, pp. 401–7.